Thanksgiving What Really Happened? Digg this
The longer version is here if you would like to read it.
There is nothing wrong with Thanksgiving today, it is just that the history have been mixed up and changed many times over the years. It is based on half truths and and lies. Yes American Indians in the East had their own harvest holidays, their were five of them one large one was in the Summer. However the original Thanksgiving holiday was not celebrating a dinner but a masacre. The orginal Thanksgivings were celebrating three different massacres where the Puritan Settlers trapped American Indians at the Mystic River and burned them alive. It was on this day and on two other massacres that Richard Bellingham the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared it a Thanksgiving. Later the dates of the three "battles" were combined into one day of giving thanks to the Christian god, on the advice of Washington who thought one holiday was enough. It was over a hundred years before Lincoln made it a federal holiday and inserted the mythology of a bortherly loving dinner between to cultures, two languages, and two different religions.
Too frequently the struggles of the past are twisted to parallel the struggles of today. History does repeat itself in a general way and certainly there are tried and true major themes, however more often than not it's a case of the present changing the past to make meaning of itself with ethnocentric glasses strapped on tight. Sometimes history is colored in such a great degree that it simply becomes false. Everyone in the US and Canada and most of the world has heard the official story of Thanksgiving. It's a nice tale of racial harmony and happy co-existing cultures sharing a feast and giving thanks apparently without contradictions to pantheist concepts and monotheistic myths from sun worship perverted into a self sacrificing sadomasochistic god of ego demanding worship and issuing out eternal punishment for nonbelievers and who thought it was necessary to have a son (or become a his own son) and torture and kill it as a sacrifice to himself in order to be able to save everyone from his own wrath so long as believe his masochistic tantrum. (Also known as fundamentalist Christianity.) Manifest Destiny was very much another holy war.
This merry little storybook feast didn't happen. It did not happen in Massachusetts or Virginia. Here are some things that did happen. The English enslaved the Petuxet "Indians" and sent ships full of the slaves to England in 1614, six years before the Mayflower came with English colonists. Plymouth was the third English colony in the New World. The first in was 1584, in what is now North Carolina. It was
abandoned, and the second established 1607, was Jamestown, the oldest successful colony, in what is now Virginia. The Plymouth colony was the third. It was by no means the first English speaking people to visit what is now Massachusetts, which is a Native American word which means "at or about the great hill." They were just the first English speaking people to permanently squat there.
Now the Feast myth is based on partial truth. There was a time when the American Indians did save the colony from starving to death and shared a dinner. This happened in both the Northern and Southern colonies. In the South the Natives were thanked by having their drinks poisoned. It was not however on what is now called Thanksgiving and we know that the original Thanksgiving holiday was celebrating the "victories" over the "savages" by the "civilized" Christian Zealots.
Sometimes history is colored in such a great degree that it simply becomes false. The British exploratons which existed long before the more famous Jamestown and Plymouth Rock collonies were pirate recon missions. Sir Walter Raleigh of the Roanoke colony was a notorious privateer. The Jamestown colony was sent to grow and ship back tobacco to England in exchange for food often under the conditions of work or starve. Bacon's rebellion which is colored today as the proletariat rebelling against the wealthy elite nothing of the sort. Bacon and his mob burned the tobacco field of other poor people in order to get a higher price for their own yield. But nothing quite has the spin put on it like the Thanksgiving story from Massachusetts.
IN the North the English enslaved the Petuxet Indians. When the English were capturing slaves, they left behind smallpox which decimated Native populations (sometimes as much as 90%!!). The Natives had a lack of resistances to Old World diseases which evolved slowly in the Old World developing with the 13 different domesticated herd animals (which did not exist in the New World including horses, the Spanish brought those there) along side their populations. Note that before vaccinations one of the first observations made in the fight against Small Pox was that milkmaids who contracted cow-pox were not getting Small Pox. Cow were also not native to the Americas.
The old Patuxet area had been nearly abandoned because of Small Pox. One survivor who had also been an English slave from a young age (and may have contracted cow-pox) was the famous man named Squanto, who could speak English. In the history books this is painted as some great chance miracle, because they don't want people to know about the previous voyages, how they had been enslaving American Indians and purposely spreading diseases.
It was quite common actually for the English to kidnap Native American youths to teach them English and the Bible and later use them as interpreters. The founding of the college of William & Mary (where I went to school) in Williamsburg/Jamestown was set up at first as a religious divinity school consisting of three subjects, Philosophy which was actually Christian theology, English, and Religion which was more like the practice of it rather than the studying of it, much like church vs. Sunday school. One of the main buildings was a house for Indians who were forced to go there. They were taught English and Jesus for the financial motives of the charter heads who nixed an agreement to Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s law) to send him his scientific requests for the New World Flora and Fauna. Converting "savages" gave the paternal English who polluted all their own rivers and at one point deforested their whole island, and had public floggings of women and executions as a stable of entertainment, a reason to justify their brutal conquests of "uncivilized" people. People should read what Red Cloud and other Natives brought to England and France had to say about their visits to the Hellish lands. That's too large a tangent for even me. But it's very interesting.
Interestingly, today W&M is not run by the likes of James Blair, despite having a huge black statue of the ugly Holy Roller, and they have put more pride in their Thomas Jefferson, George Washington roots. In a sense of redemption to Boyle perhaps, the college promised to and has collected at least one indigenous tree from all over the America and placed it on the campus including the most northern palm tree (which sits next to the heater of the English building) and redwood trees, which fell in 2003 because of the leftover winds from hurricane Isabel, thus breaking that tradition and promise. (Virginia was not hit by a hurricane, only a tropic storm however all the news reports would disagree with the actual evidence and wind speeds which define a hurricane. That's just another example of revised history)
The Plymouth settlers were more disruptive than any storm however. They did not see any fences on the land, a European marking of property administered by the church vestiges, and so they assumes everything was public land, and they stole land, food and children from the Wampanoag who were unlucky enough to be living near them and trust them. This lead to conflict. The Settlers were not friendly to the Natives they built an 11 foot high wall around their settlement complete with 5 cannons. The Natives quit trading with the Pilgrims who, lost in an unknown land with foreign crops, ended up in the same position as the Virginia colonies, they faced starvation.
In Virginia, however, that problem was compounded by the top down order to grow tobacco instead of food and sell it to England in order to buy food. Nathaniel Bacon put an end to that, but not in the heroic way we were all taught about the rebelling proletariat. What he did was gather a mob and go around burning other poor people’s tobacco crops insuring he and his mob could sell their own for a higher price and ensuring the others would starve. He then kidnapped the governor’s wife and the wives of his strongest supporters and had Indian allies who ignorantly/innocently saw the struggle as a rebellion against a corrupt leader.
Bacon’s tactics worked as you are all familiar with. He celebrated by having a feast with his Indian allies and he poisoned the wine of the men, killing them, and I think we know what happened to the women. That’s the part left out of PC history books. Bacon attacked the Pamunkey (who are still surviving but currently only number 58 people. It is extremely rare for any of the original Native American groups from the East coast to have survived) and the Occaneecheee and pitched a fit at Governor Berkeley for not appointing him as the General for all Indian affairs. The elite did not care, they wanted people to starve to death as it relieved them of their 7 and 6 year contracts which promised land in exchange of the indentured servitude. Once again Bacon was no more than Berkeley’s land pirate/terrorist who between the two egos nearly burned all of Jamestown. Problem, action, solution.
The belligerent compliments in the north were starving to death after walling themselves up to protect themselves from the backlash to their unchecked provocations. Ending trade, they were forced to negotiate. They invited a Native man named Massasoit to dinner, or more accurately allowed him to come into the settlement because his band had bagged 5 deer. The colony was heavily inebriated as was necessary both for the calories and control. Massaoit honored his band's fortune with the tradition of sharing and invited 100s of Natives to the feast who also brought food. The Europeans were not amused but hunger took precedence. They actually blamed the Indians for hording food. It was not long before they were murdering the Indians again. All in the good lords name of course.
In 1630s just a dozen winters or so from the arrival of the Mayflower and only a few years after the arrival of Christian Zealots known as Puritans, the real mass butchering began. In 1637 Europeans forces cornered 700 Natives mostly women and children at the mouth of the Mystic river. They shot and beat to death the men and burned everyone else in longhouse fires. Bounties were set on the head of Indians with the price for a woman’s scalp being the highest (something that lasted until the 1930s) to encourage murder. And that is where the term Redskin comes from. Native Americans are not red. The red refers to the blood stained scalps which acted like trophies. In fact when the Spanish accidentally discovered (for themselves) the new world they thought they were in India and this is why the people were ignorantly named Indians, a name that did not change despite later indisputable evidence that they were indeed not in India. There was no mention of (Asian) Indians being red, but light skinned to dark skinned browns, which they made a nifty little religiously supported racist caste system for and kept a very good record of as it was very important to them.
By 1671 the English and Dutch mercenaries were in a full scale war with the Wampanoag and Chief Metacomet who they renamed King Philip, (thus King Philips War) because the whole concept of a society not ruled by a (divinely appointed) central figure determined by bloodlines, was a totally alien and incomprehensible to the “civilized” English. They just invented a king to fight.
It was this Mystic River massacre along with 2 other large massacres that had Richard Bellingham the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared it a Thanksgiving. It was George Washington who finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Of course they didn't label them as massacres, they saw them as god assisted triumphs. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving Day to a legal national holiday. (Before that it was a State Holiday). Lincoln needed a brotherly mythology as in his war it actually was a matter of brother against brother and the Natives above the and West of the Union could threaten to create a new front. It was from Lincoln that a mythology became historized. FDR would later establish the fixed date of the next to the last Thursday in November for Thanksgiving mainly for commercials interest as it was considered inappropriate to advertise products for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. This gave everyone a longer period to sell. Yes even back then people put up xmas lights and decorations months before Christmas. It is the largest capitalist holiday you know. It is not that mythologies are bad it's just that they are not true and when it comes to history we have a duty to uphold the truth including the bad and the ugly.
Who are the real savages? Who are the terrorists? Who are the real pirates? And when will we unchain history and not censor the brutal past for the sake of feel good fantasy stories? Never, probably never. On a lighter note, Turkey Day has morphed into a positive and loosely Native American Holiday. The common foods, turkey, cranberries, pumpkin, corn, potatoes, and cornbread are all American foods that were once exclusive to the Americas. It's also a time to gather the family, to pig out and watch the Redskins play football.
If you think the crimes of the past have gone away because people don't talk about them and cover things up with stories think again.
<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.sw ... 8078&hl=en" flashvars=""> </embed> In the 1970s Under the Family Planning Act approved By George Bush Sr. 42% on Native women were targeted for sterilization. At the same time another scandal where mothers of white children were told that their babies had died and then the perfectly healthy babies were sold to rich families (unaware of what was going on) looking to adopt white children. Ric Flair the famous Pro Wrestler who lives in North Carolina discovered that he was one of those children and he wrote about it in his book. This was in America. That babies could be stolen from mothers and other potential mothers could be sterilized. Bush Sr. was part of the Family Planning Act. Well he is the son of a Nazi sympathizer/financier and just look at what his sons are doing particularly George Jr. Oh they can not be as overt in their racism as they used to but believe me it never went away. Bush reminds me of those psychotic Puritans burning people by the river. He thinks he is doing the Lords work and calls his wars a crusade. As the saying goes "We have to learn history or we are damned to repeat it."
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Happy Thanksgiving.
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